Category Archives: Banking and finance

Sweden is a member of the Financial Task Force, hereinafter referred as FATF, which develops international standards for combating money laundering, terrorist financing and financing of weapons of mass destruction. In the year of 2012, the FATF revised their standards. According to these standards countries will have to, inter alia, ... Read More »

The Capital Markets Union (CMU) is a plan from the European Commission that aims to create deeper and more integrated capital markets in the 28 Member States of the EU. The CMU is a new frontier of the Europe´s single market. Its creation is a key element of the Investment ... Read More »

On June 2, 2015, the United States’ Supreme Court issued the opinion in the case of Bank of America v. Caulket, where the Court ruled that a Debtor whose home is ‘underwater’ cannot “Strip off” or void a junior lien when filing for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy protection. The Court in ... Read More »

This post will be a follow-up to my post on January 9, regarding when a debt collector must tell a consumer reporting agency (CRA) that a consumer has disputed a debt. In that post, I discussed cases which say that if a debt collector knows that a debt is disputed, ... Read More »

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently upheld a district court’s grant of summary judgment dismissing a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) legal action contending that a company’s policy of using criminal background and credit history checks in its hiring process disproportionately excluded African American applicants. ... Read More »

When making a loan to a business entity, a lender will frequently also have one or more individuals personally obligated for the payment and performance of the loan. An individual becomes personally obligated in one of two ways: (1) the individual signs the note as a co-maker along with the ... Read More »

In a public appearance at the National Press Club yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that he has given federal prosecutors a 90-day deadline to evaluate whether they can bring civil or criminal cases against any individuals for their role in the 2008 financial crisis. Holder stated that federal prosecutors ... Read More »

The Swedish Securities Market Commission has published a report with proposals on how the Directive (MiFID II) and the Regulation (MiFIR) on markets in financial instruments should be implemented in to Swedish law. The regulations are coming into force on January 3, 2017. The Securities Market Commission proposes, inter alia, ... Read More »

Directive 2013/50/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council on amending of the Transparency Directive, known as the “Amending Directive”, has led to a report (SOU 2014: 70) on changing information requirements on the securities market and indicates proposals for implementation of the Amending Directive in Sweden. The report ... Read More »

MoneyGram International Inc., (MoneyGram) the world’s second-largest money transfer company, lost its bid before the U.S. Tax Court (the Court) to prove that it is a bank, and in so doing its quest to take advantage of provisions of the U.S. Tax Code regarding the type of tax deductions that ... Read More »

ISDA seeks to address the section 2(a)(iii) insolvency unfairness with respect to derivatives. Both of the ISDA master agreements which are used for over the counter derivatives from small scale interest rate swaps to larger equity derivatives transactions include a provision (which is generally not disapplied) that if there is ... Read More »

Until July 1, 2016 all capital companies (limited liability companies and joint-stock companies) registered in the Republic of Latvia are obliged to submit to the Register of Enterprises an edited version of the statutes, in which a value of the share capital is stated in euro. Starting from July 1, ... Read More »

Banks often provide credit facilities in the form of current accounts. Securing credit is no sinecure these days. The bank’s cancellation of credit, on the other hand, seems dead simple. Take for example the general terms and conditions of a business credit from a (large) Dutch bank chosen at random: ... Read More »

Banks have a special duty of care with respect to (private) clients. This duty of care was recently applied in cases concerning interest rate swaps. One example of this is the (interim) decision of the Appeal Court of Den Bosch of 15 April 2014, in which the Court ruled that ... Read More »